Lufthansa Flight Attendants Strike to Drag Into the Week

Yet another strike hit Lufthansa this week, but this time, it was the carrier’s flight attendants—not the pilots—who are walking out.

The Lufthansa strike by the cabin crewmembers is set to continue Tuesday and is expected to affect a number of long-distance flights to and from the carrier’s main hubs at Munich, Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf. The flight attendants have threatened to continue their walkout through Friday.

Lufthansa said it expects that 136 flights will have to be canceled today, affecting 27,300 passengers—far fewer than the 100,000 passengers holding reservations on 929 flights that had to be scrubbed Monday. The action doesn’t extend to flights aboard Lufthansa’s sister airlines, including Austrian, Swiss, and Brussels, whose flights from the states to hubs in Vienna, Zurich, and Brussels will continue to operate as normal.

Lufthansa said it’s trying to maintain as much of its transatlantic schedule as possible; while one flight from New York has been canceled today, at least one other flight from JFK to Frankfurt will operate, and flights from Washington and Chicago to Frankfurt are set to take off. The carrier said that passengers booked on flights this week should check their status on lufthansa.com and that it would seek to accommodate fliers on other services.

In the past year, Lufthansa’s pilots staged a series of walkouts that cost the carrier millions in lost revenue. The flight attendants’ union also staged a short strike during the summer but it did not have a serious impact on flights, the carrier said. Both unions are protesting the airline’s moves to rein in costs by changing the terms of employee retirement plans.